The last member of the Cambridge Five spy ring was allowed to escape prosecution for passing secrets to the Russians to avoid the embarrassment of the public learning that his brother was the government’s chief economic adviser, documents released by the National Archives suggest.
John Cairncross was recruited by the KGB while at Cambridge in the 1930s, part of the same infamous spy circle as Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and Donald Maclean.
Cairncross joined the civil service and worked for the Cabinet Office and the Foreign Office before taking up duties as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park during the Second World War and joining MI6.
He is thought to have been responsible for alerting the Russians about British efforts to produce an atomic bomb, prompting Joseph Stalin to start his own nuclear weapons programme.
British intelligence agents interrogated him in 1951 after discovering a link between him and Maclean, who had disappeared along with Burgess, later to surface as defectors to the Soviet Union.
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The agents were unable to extract a confession and, having no other evidence, dropped their investigations. Cairncross left his Treasury job and moved to Rome.
Suspicions that Cairncross was the long-sought “Fifth Man” of the Cambridge ring never disappeared.
In 1964 he was offered a teaching job at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio and the US authorities agreed to allow MI5 to interrogate him on his arrival there. In a hotel room in Cleveland, Cairncross gave up his secrets, confessing that he had been recruited by Norman Klugmann, a British Communist Party member, to work for the KGB. He did so until the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean, after which the Russians made no further attempt to contact him.
His confession caused consternation in Whitehall. In a flurry of memos, officials fretted that Cairncross’s revelations “could give rise to some political embarrassment. Why did the confession have to be obtained in the United States and not in London?”
Intelligence agents had failed to question Cairncross on British soil on his way from Rome to Cleveland when he stopped in London to pick up his US visa.
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Nothing Cairncross confessed to in his Ohio hotel room was admissible, having been obtained on American soil by a member of the secret services and not the police.
There was also the question of whether he could be extradited to Britain to face prosecution. Espionage was not an extraditable offence. Officials mused that the US might not be persuaded to deport Cairncross simply to get around legal inconveniences.
A further source of embarrassment remained. Cairncross’s brother, Alec Cairncross, a senior civil servant, had recently taken up a post as chief economic adviser to the government, a connection hardly likely to go unnoticed.
Burke Trend, the cabinet secretary, wrote a memo to the prime minister, Alec Douglas-Home. “Quite apart from the distress and embarrassment which this would inflict on an individual whose integrity we have no reason to question, we have to ask ourselves what would be the probable result, in terms of public policy in the widest sense, if it became known that the government were employing, as their chief economic adviser, a man who is the brother of a self-confessed communist spy,” he wrote.
“This is a harsh and crude way of putting it; but that is how, I fear, it could, and probably would, be represented.”
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When the US authorities decided Cairncross represented no threat, Downing Street dropped its inquiries into his possible deportation. Cairncross later moved back to Rome to become a translator with the United Nations and several Italian banks. In 1979, his identity as the Fifth Ma” was revealed by Barry Penrose and David Leith on the front page of The Sunday Times.
He retired to the south of France, returning to Britain in 1995 to marry the American opera singer Gayle Brinkerhoff, before dying the same year of a stroke.